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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29513163">taking over this town, they should worry</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/pathofcomets/pseuds/pathofcomets'>pathofcomets</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>WandaVision (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Canon Compliant, Dysfunctional Family, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Family Dynamics, Gen, Internal Conflict, Mother-Son Relationship, Motherhood, Mutant Powers, Normal Life, Psychological Trauma, True Love, Unresolved Emotional Tension</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 04:34:06</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,910</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29513163</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/pathofcomets/pseuds/pathofcomets</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>She has a house, she has a husband, and she has a baby on its way. She has something to hold on to, to protect, and she is not about to ever let it go. Even if it’s so frail, even if it hurts just as bad to keep it together as it does to come apart.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Wanda Maximoff/Vision</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>5</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>53</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>taking over this town, they should worry</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>I wanted to explore Wanda's complicated relation to love and motherhood, and how she has to balance the normality of family life with the fact that she still has mutant powers, and that the world is slowly falling around her (again.) More or less this started from me imagining how much of a lion mama Wanda truly is.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Wanda has always been protective: fiercely so, to extents that would put most displays of loyalty to shame. It starts with her brother, her twin, the other half of her, and then it simply became who she is. When she had, for so long, nothing else but the clothes on her back, the belief in her heart and Pietro’s hand to hold, she learnt that she would rather die than let it go.</p><p>It continues with her home, ravaged by war and destruction. She holds on to a picture, toothy grins and caring parents. She holds on to her mother tongue, whispered late into the night, as she shares her insomnia with her sibling. She tastes it in her traditional food, recipe not known, but guessed at by how much it smells and tastes like her mother’s. Even when home is not there anymore, not in any way that matters, she still thinks of Novi Grad as the place that she should keep safe, simply because she belongs to it as much as it belongs to her.</p><p>It is her best trait, she thinks. It allows her to fight, and fighting matters more than anything else. It makes her relations intense, bursts of so much care and passion. It is also her biggest fault, because Wanda never backs down, and when made to choose between something she loves and something right, she’ll always pick the first. Pietro is the only person who never held it against her. She becomes a terrorist threat because of it, because at the end of the day, even if she is a mutant, she is also still only human.</p><p>Her heart is fragile. Wanda’s heart breaks, many times over and over, and she never learns her lesson. Because Wanda cares just as desperately each and every time, for every person entering her life. She trusts one person not to hurt her again, since he did most of the damage at the beginning of their acquaintance anyway: Vision.</p><p>Vision is a wall against which her care crushes. He stands firm, proclaiming he loves her, and Wanda knows without testing that out of the two of them, she will always be the one who loves more. It is simply who she is. She opens her arms wide, heart still wounded, but needing so badly to forgive, and he somehow always keeps returning. She plants her feet firmly on the ground, red around her eyes, at her fingertips, to protect the man she loves. She begs to find another solution to the end of the world, that does not include him.</p><p>When he talks of death, she shivers in his arms, hold on to his shirt, and chants in her head just pleas to never have to let go of another person ever again. But it’s just the Maximoff luck to not only have to say her goodbye, but to be the reason why it happens in the first place.</p><p>Wanda’s heart is not made for this. She is made for love and forever, neither which she’s gotten for more than a fragmentary moment in her life. If they wanted him gone so badly, then they should have allowed her to follow him in death. This – this is no way to live –</p><p> </p><p>This is Westview, suburban heaven for any ‘50s newlywed couple. And, Wanda fluffs the dress around her, she is one happy bride, about to live her happy perfect life with the man she loves. Vision, in his suit, looks stunning, like a figment of her imagination and –</p><p>And Wanda smile at him, going for a kiss to seal their forever. She puts a ring on their fingers, material proof of their relationship, something they had to keep hidden until now. She moans against his skin and she waits for him after work days and she irons her pretty dresses to represent their little family in town meetings and Wanda is – happy.</p><p>Happier still when she finds she is pregnant. The calendar on their wall is not there anymore, time a fragile thing now; no need to remind anyone that this is not quite as real as reality, a mocking of her heart’s desires. But that’s the point. Reality is cruel and unfair and things are different here and Wanda is over allowing anyone else to make the choices for her.</p><p>She has a house, she has a husband, and she has a baby on its way. She has something to hold on to, to protect, and she is not about to ever let it go. Even if it’s so frail, even if it hurts just as bad to keep it together as it does to come apart.</p><p>She wants her baby’s name to be Tommy: nothing but normality, a true American name, her new life come together. Vision likes Shakespeare, always had: she remembers how he’d always read his plays, because there’s nothing quite like one of the greatest writers in the world to teach him about humanity. She likes to believe she played a part in it as well, her love for him, his love for her.</p><p>When it’s revealed they are actually going to have twins, it comes full circle. Her brother, her husband – all of her love, overflowing towards these tiny babies, proof of her heart holding so much inside it. Both the parents’ wishes fulfilled.</p><p>Wanda sits on the house stairs, late into the night, after the twins finally fell asleep, and she weeps. She cannot say why: because there’s something in her genetic heritage that allowed the birth of two baby boys, instead of one, and she was a twin as well, <strong>is</strong> one, her brother always and forever a part of her. Because this is less about playing house, and more about what love can fill up, what love can create. Because she never wants to let them go, as she rocks them in her arms, nose nuzzled at the crown of their heads, taking in their baby smell, so real. Because she thought she knew love before, but nothing can compare with the overwhelming avalanche of feeling that she has for these children that she carried inside her, that she gave birth to, that now mean the entire world for her.</p><p>This is Wanda’s life now.</p><p>Maybe if she lives a life like the one her parents always wanted but never got to live, then her heart can finally find roots. Then she maybe can settle, allow her scarred mind some peace, embrace the peace found in the domestic lull of every day just like the other. The background is different, but Wanda doesn’t want to be special anymore. Wanda wants to be so normal, even in her unusualness, that the American dream turns to reality under her fingertips.</p><p>She takes stupid pleasure in dressing up her sons every morning, smoothing their hair with her fingertips because they’re going through a phrase where they hate all hairbrushes, having to remind them to properly tie their sneakers before they go outside, anxious that they might get hurt. She’s overwhelmed with awe at every little thing they do, at the still youthful innocence they have when they call her over to show her every discovery about the world that they make.</p><p>She wishes she could share all of this with Vision, but Vision starts seeing through the cracks, and she’s growing messy and inattentive. Things get through.</p><p>Wanda and Pietro were only 10 when they lost their parents to a bomb attack. Her children are younger than that when the first attack on her city, on her family is attempted. She sees red, literally. She is never allowed to be: just a kid, just a sister, just a young woman, just a woman in love. She always has to carry the weight of her powers, the blame of imagined mistakes. She’s always been angry over this, she’s angrier still now that all she wants is to be just a mother.</p><p>Things get through. Wanda doesn’t know how the dog came to be, in her carefully made-up snow globe of dream life, but the boys smile at her, throwing the puppy eyes they got so good at using as a weapon, and it’s probably all the convincing that she needs. The boys grow to the appropriate age to care for Sparky, and Vision goes to work, because she doesn’t want to lie to the man she loves.</p><p>“But it’s a Saturday,” Tommy says, and Wanda cannot reply for a moment, because she wasn’t aware of this detail to begin with.</p><p>She’s not sure she knows what day is. But she knows that her twins do not deserve being caught in the crossfire of her marital fight. She holds them against her body, remembering a time when they were literally part of her, whispering soothing words of love. Because while she cannot tell for certain if Vision still cares for her, she knows that he most definitely adores his sons. And their babies deserve all the love in the universe.</p><p>Things get through. When the dog dies, she thinks to console is enough. It is not.</p><p>“Mom, you bring back people! Can’t you do the same for Sparky?”</p><p>“Some things are irreversible.”</p><p>Maybe that’s why the doorbell rings. Just one more Maximoff to love her Tommy and Billy. Even if it’s not right, even if so many things are incorrect. Wanda accepts this wanna-be-Pietro because he seems to love his nephews, and that’s the only thing that matters to her. But she is always waiting now: for things to get out of control, for just one threatening sign. For a sign that would allow her to break.</p><p>She sits in the living room, on the floor near the end of the couch, long after Pietro fell asleep, listening to the rise and fall of his breathing, racking her brains trying to remember if it’s the same rhythm she’s listened to for over twenty years of her life.</p><p>She has more people to protect now. She has mistakes she learned from. Tommy gets her brother’s superpower, Billy gets her. Wanda, in her stupid Halloween costume, just wants to cry, again, because it feels like some kind of sign and she loves these kids so much that she doesn’t know what to do with herself.</p><p>When Billy and Tommy are 10, they almost lose Vision.</p><p>“Calm down, sister. It’s not like your dead husband can die again.”</p><p>She slams Pietro away. Timmy and Billy wait in front of her, as magic seeps around them, and when the silence finally settles, just the labored breathing of their uncle, they each clasp one of Wanda’s hands in theirs. She kisses their heads.</p><p>“Is dad okay?” Billy asks, anxiety making his voice tremble.</p><p>Timmy, awed, stares at all the people stooped mid-action. Wanda sighs, exhausted to the bones.</p><p>“He will be, of course,” she forces herself to smile. “Where do you think you got all these tricks from?”</p><p>“You,” Tommy answers, openly.</p><p>Wanda closes her eyes, against the relief and pain of being so known. Pietro apologizes, from somewhere at her side.</p><p>“You stay with your uncle, okay?”</p><p>“But mom… he’s not really our uncle, is he?” Billy asks.</p><p>Her heart fills with pride.</p><p>“For now, he better be,” she speaks calmly, but Pietro doesn’t miss the threatening glance directed at him. “You know where to find me.”</p><p>She doesn’t add <em>if something goes wrong.</em> It already did.</p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Thank you for reading!</p><p>I also have  a <a href="https://pathofcomets.tumblr.com/"> tumblr</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/pathofcomets"> twitter</a>! where you can reach me!</p></blockquote></div></div>
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